In January 2005,
acting LDP secretary-general Abe Shinzo caused
a minor sensation when he told the Asahi Shimbun that
he had successfully demanded that the public
Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nihon Hoso
Kyokai, or NHK) censor a 2001 documentary about
the "comfort
women." The episode seems to confirm the charge that the mainstream
Japanese media are too timid. Whether as a result
of institutional factors such as the press club system, or cultural
tendencies to avoid confrontation and defer to
authority, the Japanese press is said to play
the role of "lapdog" to
those in power, in Ellis Krauss's vivid analogy,
rather than tackling hard issues or engaging
in fearless investigative journalism. [1]
Such critics often seem to have the American
Fourth Estate in mind as the global standard
for a free, fair and feisty "watchdog." Laurie
Freeman, for example, describes Japanese news
as "an informationally
inferior product where people do not get 'all the news that's fit
to print,'" making
explicit the contrast to the New York Times and its famous
motto. [2]

Is it time to
rethink the comparison? Even as details of
the NHK affair emerged, the issue of media self-censorship came
into sharp focus in America in a case as politically charged in
the U.S. as war guilt is in Japan: gay marriage. Viewed together,
the events show that while it is still true that Japanese television
networks are easily intimidated by political pressure, the same must
also be said of their American counterparts. Ironically, though,
the cases also suggest that public broadcasters,
while vulnerable to political threats to cut
their funding, are nevertheless more likely to
tackle controversial issues than their supposedly more independent
commercial rivals.

The first case
involves NHK which is, at the time of writing,
at the center of a major row over its coverage of the reparations
movement on behalf of the surviving "comfort women" who were forced into sexual
slavery by the Japanese Army during World War Two. In
December 2000, a coalition of women's groups and comfort women supporters
from across Asia gathered in Tokyo to hold a "People's Tribunal" to
highlight the issue of the wartime government's
legal responsibility for the system, and the
liability of the present government for reparations.

In 2001 NHK commissioned
an independent production company to make a
documentary about the reparations movement,
using the Tribunal as a focus. In its first draft the documentary was to have included
taped testimony of Japanese veterans admitting to having raped Chinese
women; a statement by a UN International War Crimes Tribunal
judge to the effect that Emperor Hirohito was guilty of crimes against
humanity; and an expert legal opinion that the present Japanese
government was liable to pay compensation to survivors. Such
content was bound to be incendiary for those nationalists in Japan
for whom any discussion of war crimes is off-limits. But hours
before the scheduled airtime, following an unprecedented
special screening for senior management, all
these segments were ordered cut.

They were replaced
by, among other items, an interview with Hata
Ikuhiko, a nationalist historian who denied that there had ever
been a system of sexual slavery, and some gratuitously irrelevant
footage of U.S. bombers in action over Vietnam. Even the program's
title was watered down from "Japanese Military's Wartime Sexual Violence" ( Dainiji
Taisen Nihongun ni yoru seiboryoku ), given in advance TV listings,
to "Questioning Wartime Sexual Violence" ( Towareru senji seiboryoku ). These
and other changes such as extensive re-editing of remarks made by
studio commentators, had the effect of dramatically changing the documentary's
message. The tone changed from one basically sympathetic to
the goals of Tribunal to one that was broadly negative and much closer
in line to the government policy on the reparations issue.

The precise impetus
behind the last-minute changes remained unclear
until February 2005, when two senior Cabinet ministers from the
ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), acting party Secretary-General
Abe Shinzo and Nakagawa Shoichi, minister of Economy, Trade and
Industry, told the Asahi
Shimbun that the revisions had been made
at their insistence. Both men seemed genuinely surprised by
the ensuing uproar, and quickly if unconvincingly
retracted their admissions. Abe then went on
the talk show circuit, denying that he had pressured NHK but also
denouncing the Tribunal as biased and full of North Korean spies. NHK's
most senior management, having acquiesced to the revisions in the
first place, also publicly maintained that the changes were a non-political
matter of editorial discretion. Few Japanese believe them. In
the wake of the story, several NHK producers stated in public what
they have long been saying in private: editorial interference from
the LDP has been growing noticeably since Ebisawa Katsuji, a close
political ally of the LDP in general and of Hashimoto Ryutaro in particular,
was appointed Chairman of NHK by Prime Minister
Hashimoto in 1997. Even
NHK's Director-General of Broadcasting contradicted
the official line, candidly admitting that, "The NHK budget has to
be approved by the Diet, so it's necessary to gain the clear understanding
of Diet members concerning our business plans and specific programs." [3]

At first glance
this episode seems to confirm conventional
wisdom about the political leanings of publicly
funded television in general, and of NHK in
particular. Opponents
of public television expect a broadcaster dependent on government
approval for funds to be at worst a mouthpiece for the government,
or at best an inoffensive patsy. Ellis
Krauss's wonderful study of NHK provides support
for both views, arguing that: "The most important consequence of
the combination of formal and informal means
of influence by the LDP on NHK has been a particularly effective
self-censorship." [4]
He also highlights the very powerful legitimating
function that NHK has had for the LDP-dominated state.

But at second
glance, NHK's role shows up better in the sense
that none of Japan's commercial TV networks even tried to cover
the Tribunal or the wider movement. This helps explain why, despite repeated
instances of conservative bias, opposition parties have historically
been muted in their criticism of NHK. Japan's commercial TV
networks are as susceptible as any to the pressures of "dumbing down," and
to the extent that NHK avoids the sensational
and the trivial, it is regarded with relative
approval by politicians of all ideological persuasions.

NHK attracts
some of the most dedicated and gifted journalists
in Japan, and the production quality of news
and documentaries is extraordinarily high. Moreover, the
strict quantitative even-handedness, by which all political parties
are accorded air time in proportion to their Diet strength, benefits
minor parties such as the Japan Communist Party that are often completely
ignored by commercial stations. Thus,
despite the criticisms leveled in the Diet at
NHK by various opposition party members for
this incident, there is little sense that Japan's
democracy would be better served by getting rid of the broadcaster
entirely. Indeed,
Lord Annan, author of a major report on public
broadcasting in the UK, once suggested that, "Those responsible for broadcasting
policy in Britain should look to Japan and the
NHK for their model rather than to America." [5]

Annan's misgivings
about the integrity of American broadcasting
would have been confirmed by the recent "Bustergate" flap. "Postcards
from Buster" is a children's show produced by Boston WGBH, a local
affiliate of the national Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). In
the show, the eponymous cartoon rabbit visits real-life families across
America and reports on their lives and customs. He's visited
Mormons, Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, Puerto Ricans, and Hmong
without incident. The offending episode, "Sugartime," features
two lesbian couples and their families who produce maple sugar and
cheese in rural Vermont. Civil unions are legal in Vermont,
and the focus of the program was on maple-sugar production rather
than sexual orientation, but this was still too much for the Bush
Administration. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings wrote
to PBS on January 25, shortly before the show was scheduled to air,
that "many parents would not want their young children to be exposed
to the lifestyles portrayed in the episode." She went on suggest
that PBS "strongly consider" returning all federal money which had
been used to make the show. Since the Department of Education
funds approximately two-thirds of the budget for "Postcards from Buster" this
seemed like a serious threat.

Legally, though, Spellings did not have a leg to stand on. The
terms of the Education Department grant which funded the series includes
the requirement that "Diversity will be incorporated into the fabric
of the series to help children understand and respect differences
and learn to live in a multicultural society. The series will
avoid stereotypical images of all kinds and show modern multi-ethnic/lingual/cultural
families and children." Nonetheless, PBS backed down
immediately, and pulled the episode from the national schedule. WGBH
then offered the episode to any of the 349 local PBS stations that
dared to air it. Just thirty-five took up the offer.

The intervention
is part of a broader pattern of aggressive
media manipulation by the Bush administration. Several supposedly
independent journalists have admitted to accepting payments from government
agencies, including the Department of Education to promote administration
policies. In one notorious case, the Department of Education
paid $240,000 to a conservative African-American columnist to write
favorably about Bush's No Child Left Behind Act.

In a related
strategy, the White House is aggressively feeding
TV networks video news reports (VNRs) -- clips which appear to be
independent news coverage of policy issues but are in fact government-produced
and scripted. Stories are "reported" by government employees
who act and sign off in the manner of investigative journalists. Needless
to say, the "coverage," while appearing to be objective, is inevitably
slanted towards the Administration. Many local
stations, facing growing competition from cable
news and limited budgets for news coverage, run
VNRs without attributing sources.

Finally, on the "moral values" front, the Federal Communications
Commission has aggressively fined networks for profanity and
such acts of indecency as the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during
the 2004 Superbowl because of an alleged "costume malfunction." Fines
for indecency on TV or radio jumped from $444,000 in 2003 to nearly
$8 million in 2004. So intimidated are the networks that many
cancelled showings of "Saving Private Ryan," scheduled to commemorate
the Anniversary of D-Day, because of the bad language. The
FCC's refusal to comment on the decency or otherwise
of programs before they air has only added to
the climate of unease in which self-censorship
flourishes.

There are some
important lessons here for those concerned
about the vitality and independence of mainstream television media. First
is that it was the public broadcasters rather than their commercial
rivals who dared even to try to tackle the taboo subjects. This
suggests that self-censorship, routinely practiced by commercial stations
anxious not to offend sponsors or hurt ratings, is often more powerful
in stifling discussion of controversial topics than the more direct
censorship of government officials who invoke control over public
broadcastings budgets to "suggest" editorial changes. By
sidelining public television, conservatives are sidelining the most
active forum for debating the "moral values" of their core constituents.

The second lesson
concerns how differently the public in each
country reacted to events. In America, the notion of public broadcasting
has never been strong: PBS has a miniscule 3% audience share. In
addition, fierce competition leads the commercial networks to avoid
anything controversial, and the success of Fox News has demonstrated
that nationalistic news coverage and public loyalty to the Administration
can be highly profitable. The effect has been a climate
of growing complacency and even indifference to attacks on the press:
a recent survey revealed that more than one third of American high
school students believe that their country has too much free speech,
and about half believe that newspapers should not be allowed to publish
stories that do not have government approval. "Bustergate" became
a non-issue here just days after it broke.

In Japan, by
contrast, NHK commands equal viewership to
its commercial rivals and the value of public broadcasting is far
more widely accepted. There,
nearly 70% of recent pollees believe that it was wrong for NHK to
inform politicians of the content of programs before screening, and
the scandal was a significant factor in forcing the resignation of
Chairman Ebisawa. This is not to excuse NHK from the
charge of capitulation to a crude act of political pressure in the
cause of war crimes denial. The point is, American broadcasters
do not appear to be showing very much more of
the watchdog spirit as conservatives and nationalists
attack socially progressive programming.

HENRY
LAURENCE is an Associate Professor of Government
and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College, Brunswick,
Maine. He is the author of Money Rules: the
New Politics of Finance in Britain and Japan
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). His current research is a
comparative study of public broadcasting systems in Britain, Japan,
and the U.S. He has a BA from Oxford University, a Ph.D. in
Political Science from Harvard University, and
has served as a Research Associate at the University
of Tokyo. He is also the author of "The Big Bang and the Sokaiya ," JPRI
Critique Vol. VI, No. 8 (August 1999). His e-mail
is hlaurenc@bowdoin.edu .